Enhanced production of select phytocannabinoids in medical cultivars using microbial consortia.

The root microbiome of medical cannabis plants has been largely unexplored due to past legal restrictions in many countries. Microbes that live on and within the tissue of L. similar to other plants, provide advantages such as stimulating plant growth, helping it absorb minerals, providing protection against pathogen attacks, and influencing the production of secondary metabolites.

Effective isolation of cannabidiol and cannabidiolic acid free of psychotropic phytocannabinoids from hemp extract by fast centrifugal partition chromatography.

Cannabidiol (CBD), together with its precursor cannabidiolic acid (CBDA), is the major phytocannabinoid occurring in most hemp cultivars. To ensure the safe use of these compounds, their effective isolation from hemp extract is required, with special emphasis on the elimination of ∆-tetrahydrocannabinol (∆-THC) and ∆-tetrahydrocannabinolic acid (∆-THCA-A). In this study, we demonstrate the applicability of fast centrifugal partition chromatography (FCPC) as a challenging format of counter-current preparative chromatography for the isolation of CBD and CBDA free of psychotropic compounds that may occur in Cannabis sativa L.

Clinical evidence that a dysregulated master neural network modulator may aid in diagnosing schizophrenia.

There are no validated biomarkers for schizophrenia (SCZ), a disorder linked to neural network dysfunction. We demonstrate that collapsin response mediator protein-2 (CRMP2), a master regulator of cytoskeleton and, hence, neural circuitry, may form the basis for a biomarker because its activity is uniquely imbalanced in SCZ patients. CRMP2's activity depends upon its phosphorylation state.